Using visuals make your social media posts much more interesting and helps them stand out in a very busy online world. In fact, articles with images get 94% more views than those without.
Creating amazing graphics is made easier with some amazing free stock photo image sites. These sites provide beautiful and free (bonus!) images that you can use to create everything from blog images to shareable quotes for social media posts.
Quick tip– when using free images, make sure the images are licensed under Creative Commons Zero so that you can copy, modify, distribute and use the photos for free, including commercial purposes. If you already have a photographer that you use for your images, that is perfect, but some smaller businesses don’t have the resources to spend on high-quality images. That is where these cool sites come in.
Pexels
One of my favourite free image sites, Pexels offers business pics, concert scenes and outdoor landscapes. As of this post, they have over 6,000 free stock photos and they add 1500 new high-resolution photos every month.
Unsplash
Unsplash has some of the most beautiful outdoor photos, which are perfect for creating inspirational graphics. There is an amazing selection of beautiful photos to use, mostly outdoor shots and scenery. You can subscribe and receive 10 new photos every 10 days which is pretty cool and saves you time because you don’t have to go searching for images, they come to you.
LibreStock
LibreStock is a really cool option because it searches over 40 free stock photo websites to find the best images to use. This is another huge time-saver, because instead of combing through all 40 sites, it searches for you. Their database searches over 40,000 images, and searches sites like Pixabay and Fancy Crave.
Pixabay
Pixabay has close to 600,000 images, illustrations, vector graphics and even video clips. The images range from everything from beautiful outdoor photos to food close-ups.
Picjumbo
Picjumbo provides free photos and is fairly easy to search. They also have the option to subscribe to be notified of new images, and they also offer a premium option so you can have access to all their collections (I only use the free option, so I’m not sure of all the premium benefits).
All the Free Stock
All the Free Stock is really cool because you can not only use a multi-site search option which uses Visual Hunt and Librestock, you can also search for videos, sound effects, fonts and icons.
Death to the Stock Photo
Subscribe to Death to the Stock Photo and get cool photos delivered to your inbox.
A few other options that send images to your inbox (but I haven’t spent a lot of time looking at yet)
Where do you find images to use for social media and blog posts? Share with me!
This is a pretty useful list, thanks 👍 I’ll recommend also https://imageric.com with tons of free photos, vectors and videos under CC0 licence (Public Domain).
Thanks Martin! I’ll have to check that one out, never heard of it!
Thank you for this info! Should check also http://publicdomainphotography.com! These guys are awesome. It’s a very user friendly platform. They add photos regularly! They also offer backlinks – great for your traffic. In the profile section you can add all your relevant links! They have huge social media accounts and they know how to use it!
Thanks so much for sharing that Alex. I’m always up for learning about new resources! Thanks
Hello Leslie,
thank you for the list, I think you would also like https://avopix.com with more than 115 000 free photos under Creative Commons Zero (CC0) licence (for commercial use with no attribution).
Would you consider adding our project Avopix.com to your article? Thanks a lot!
All the best,
Martin
Wow, looks like a great site! I will keep it in mind for future articles for sure and will tell people via social media about it.